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Language Learning Is All About Input

I used to teach German online. Once I talked to an American whose German was 100 % perfect, he didn’t even have an accent. He was not a native speaker. I asked him if he talked to people in German a lot, he said almost never. He mostly just had a lot of input. Babies don’t talk until they’re 1~2 years old. First they absorb a lot of information, then they start talking.

When I was “teaching” people online I noticed that there were basically 2 kinds of learners. The ones who never stopped talking and were never listening to me (not that I wanted to talk a lot anyway lol), and the ones who talked less and more slowly, took their time to think, listen to me and correct mistakes. Guess what? Those who were talking non-stop (focused on output) generally made more mistakes and had stronger accents. I guess, since they almost never listen and reflect, they might not make that much progress.

Personally, I like to focus on input, just because it’s fun to understand things. I noticed, after some time, output comes naturally to you. Whereas trying to put out too much too fast will slow down your progress and leave you more frustrated. Unless of course, you don’t care or aren’t aware. Then there’s no problem xD